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Sunday, June 24, 2012

Feza Vest from Fiberwood Studio - Day 1

Well begun is half done...

I am so looking forward to this project. I’ve always been a fan of vests--convinced they, like their scarf cousins, can upgrade a simple jeans and top to “outfit” status. They fell out of fashion for a while, but are back. A seasonless, artsy piece like this is going to become a wardrobe staple for me, I can tell.

The trouble with vests, however, is that they often come in “one size fits all.” I’m six feet tall, and I’m here to tell you one size often doesn’t fit all of me. Ah, but that’s the wonderful thing about knitting--it puts you in control.

This means, however, that you have to do....math.

Stop trembling, dear DestiKNITters, I’ll walk you through it. Even the mathophobes among you can handle a simple quadratic equation. If it can be tackled by a sixth grader, chances are you stand a shot a success.

For me, the problem is always, always length. I am longer than the standard female (if such a thing even exists), so I have to adapt. The pattern tells me the finished vest will measure approximately 18” from the back neck. If I reach into my closet and measure the back length of a vest I know fits me well, I find it is 23” long. As this vest is knitted sideways (left edge to right edge, if you will), I know this means I need to calculate how many more stitches I must cast on than the pattern’s stated 60. Enter the glories of Algebra:

If I know 60 stitches gets me 18 inches, then I want to know how many stitches get me 23 inches. That’s X. Come on, reach back into those gray cells and remember how to solve for X (or find the nearest 6th grader--that works, too).

X is a bit over 76, so I round up for safety’s sake and cast on 80 stitches. See, that’s not so hard. It works in the other direction, too, if you need to shorten something.

My next step is to figure out if the standard two skeins of Feza Alp Natural I got from Fiberwood Studio has enough yarn for the larger vest. This is an important consideration, and I’ll walk you through that calculation in our next installment.